The Wall Street Journal reported this week that BlackBerry was on the verge of slashing 40 percent of its workforce. Today, that news has come to fruition as the company announced that it would lay off 4,500 employees. This will leave BlackBerry with 7,000 employees worldwide.

When the dust settles on fiscal Q2 2014, BlackBerry is expecting a GAAP net operating loss of $950 to $995 million.

BlackBerry President and CEO Thorsten Heins [Image Source: The Star]

"We are implementing the difficult, but necessary operational changes announced today to address our position in a maturing and more competitive industry, and to drive the company toward profitability," said BlackBerry President and CEO Thorsten Heins. Going forward, we plan to refocus our offering on our end-to-end solution of hardware, software and services for enterprises and the productive, professional end user. This puts us squarely on target with the customers that helped build BlackBerry into the leading brand today for enterprise security, manageability and reliability."

BlackBerry will also transition away from producing consumer-centric smartphones and will instead focus on what it calls "enterprise and prosumer-centric" devices. Its smartphone device-count will drop from six to four, with two high-end and two entry-level smartphones.

Under this new arrangement, the laggard Z10 will become one of the two entry-level models while the newly announced Z30 will fill in one of the "high-end" slots.

It sad that it had to come to this, but it looks as though we are witnessing the implosion of a once great smartphone company.

The funny thing is that they changed the name of the company to that of their flagship product in hope somehow help turn it around. Instead, now any bad new about the company becomes anti-advertising for the brand.